Steve Jackson Games/Secret Service Trial -- Day Two
By JOE ABERNATHY
Copyright 1993, Houston Chronicle
AUSTIN -- A young woman read aloud a deeply personal friendship
letter Wednesday in a federal civil lawsuit intended to establish the
human dimension and constitutional guarantees of electronic assembly and
communication.
Testimony indicated that the letter read by Elizabeth Cayce-McCoy
previously had been seized, printed and reviewed by the Secret Service.
Her correspondence was among 162 undelivered personal letters
testimony indicated were taken by the government in March 1990 during a
raid on Steve Jackson Games, which ran an electronic bulletin board
system as a service to its customers.
Attorneys for the Austin game publisher contend that the seizure
of the bulletin board represents a violation of the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act, which is based on Fourth Amendment
protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
"Because you bring such joy to my friend Walter's life, and also
because I liked you when I met you, though I wish I could have seen your
lovely face a little more, I'll send you an autographed copy of
Bestiary," said McCoy, reading in part from a letter penned by Steffan
O'Sullivan, the author of the GURPS Bestiary, a fantasy treatise on
mythical creatures large and small.
Although the correspondence entered the public record upon McCoy's
reading, the Chronicle obtained explicit permission from the principles
before excerpting from it.
The electronic mail was contained on the game publisher's public
bulletin board system, Illuminati, which allowed game-players, authors
and others to exchange public and personal documents. After agents
seized the BBS during a raid staged as part of a nationwide crackdown on
computer crime, Secret Service analysts reviewed, printed and deleted
the 162 pieces of undelivered mail, testimony indicated.
When the BBS computer was returned to its owner several months
later, a computer expert was able to resurrect many of the deleted
communications, including McCoy's friendship letter.
"I never thought anyone would read my mail," she testified. "I was
very shocked and embarrassed.
"When I told my father that the Secret Service had taken the Steve
Jackson bulletin board for some reason, he became very upset. He thought
that I had been linked to some computer crime investigation, and that
now our computers would be taken."
O'Sullivan, who is a free-lance game writer employed by Steve
Jackson, followed McCoy to the stand, where he testified that agents
intercepted -- via the Illuminati seizure -- a critical piece of
electronic mail seeking to establish when a quarterly royalty check
would arrive.
"That letter never arrived, and I had to borrow money to pay the
rent," he said.
No charges were ever filed in connection with the raid on Steve
Jackson Games or the simultaneous raid of the Austin home of Jackson
employee Loyd Blankenship, whose reputed membership in the Legion of
Doom hackers' group triggered the raids.
Plaintiffs contend that the government's search-and-seizure
policies have cast a chill over a constitutionally protected form of
public assembly carried out on bulletin boards, which serve as community
centers often used by hundreds of people. More than 300 people were
denied use of Jackson's bulletin board, called Illuminati, for several
months after the raid, and documents filed with the court claim that a
broader, continuing chill has been cast over the online community at
large.
The lawsuit against the Secret Service seeks to establish that the
Electronic Communications Privacy Act guarantees the privacy of
electronic mail. If U.S. District Court Judge Sam Sparks accepts this
contention, it would become necessary for the government to obtain
warrants for each caller to a bulletin board before seizing it.
The Justice Department contends that users of electronic mail do
not have a reasonable expectation to privacy, because they are
voluntarily "disclosing" their mail to a third party -- the owner of the
bulletin board system.
"We weren't going to intercept electronic mail. We were going to
access stored information," said William J. Cook, a former assistant
U.S. Attorney in Chicago who wrote the affidavit for the search warrant
used in the Steve Jackson raid.
The Justice Department attorneys did not substantially challenge
testimony by any of the several witnesses who were denied use of
Illuminati. They did, however, seek to prevent those witnesses from
testifying -- by conceding their interests -- after Cayce's compelling
appearance led off the series of witnesses.
Most of the Justice Department's energies were directed toward
countering damage claims made by Steve Jackson, whose testimony opened
the second day of the trial. Most of the day's testimony was devoted to
a complex give-and-take on accounting issues. Some $2 million is being
sought in damages.
Justice sought to counter the widely repeated assertion that Steve
Jackson Games was nearly put out of business by the raid by showing that
the company was already struggling financially when the raid was
conducted. An accountant called by the plaintiffs countered that all of
Jackson's financial problems had been corrected by a reorganization in
late 1989.